Materialism and dialectics, or the survival of Marx at the beginning of the twenty-first century

Abstract

From his earliest texts we find in Marx a paradox common to several of the “Young Left Hegelians”: they acknowledged a “disciple” relationship with Hegel while sharply criticizing the “Hegelian system”, a tension expressed by many later Marxists up to Althusser. It was Althusser who most forcefully argued that the “settling of accounts” between Marx and Hegel implies two types of “dialectic”, one idealist and one materialist. This paper takes up the theoretical problem raised by Althusser but, unlike him, argues that the distinction holds despite the strong Hegelian imprint in Capital, which is linked to the indeterminate and not necessarily “teleological” dynamic of class struggle.